Time Travel discussion
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Towards a Taxonomy of Time Travel
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Brenda
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Oct 23, 2012 08:18AM
The idea is to sort out all the various theories of time travel and categorize them. This will help us to think about the concept clearly, and not waste our time comparing apples to oranges. Illustrations from fiction or video examples are encouraged.
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Currently here is how the taxonomy stands, compiling everybody's additions:1. Time travel can change the past
A. Changes appear instantly; old time line is immediately overwritten
(A1) BTTF – Marty feels changes physically (disappearing hand) As the possibility of his non-existence becomes more likely, but his memories are never altered in any way. We don’t get to see what would have happened if he HAD disappeared. Would his actions in keeping his parents from conceiving him have been undone, creating a paradox or would this new timeline retain his (residual-alt-timeline) actions up to his disappearance?
A2) Looper – Time traveler feels the change physically AND mentally as or right after it happens but the current timeline retains his (residual-alt-timeline) actions up to that point. Characters around the time traveler see AND remember the changes to the traveler. (Someone could have witnessed Old Seth become disfigured just as we did.)
B. Changes don't appear until you get back to the/your present (A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, in which an accidental change in the past makes the present a world of intelligent reptiles). Old time line is replaced with new.
B1) The time traveler loses his old memories and only remembers the new altered reality. (As I recall this is how it worked in TIME AFTER TIME)
B2) New memories coexisting with old memories. I think this is what The Butterfly Effect movie was like, right?
C. Changes appear but retain a residual effect (you can kill your grandfather, then disappear, but grandpa remains dead)
C1) There will be a duplicate of the time traveler if time traveler tries to go back to the future because it won't be the same future reality.
C2) When returning to the future, duplicate disappears and time traveler is the only version but the future is still foreign to the traveler. (Timecop?)
C3) It is branching; every change you make creates a new different future. In theory therefore you could go and shop around all the different futures, looking for the one you like best. (There have been novels with thise theme, can't recall one.)
2. Time Travel cannot change the past.
A. Purely tourism; all you can take is photos. C.S. Lewis describes a story which he did not name, in which when the time traveler goes back raindrops penetrate like bullets, since nothing, not even the path of a raindrop, can be altered in the past.
B. Minor souvenirs can be taken back.
3. Time travel sometimes changes the past
A. Only big alterations have an impact (shooting Hitler has effect, shooting his janitor, no)
B. Even tiny alterations have an impact (Butterfly effect) and so you must be very careful on your trips to the past, lest you destroy your present. (This is the angle I used in REVISE THE WORLD.)
4. Time travel is an endless and intrinsic loop where effects create the causes that leads to the effects.
A) Cause - effect cycle has no origin.
a1) Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkhaban. There are several delicious loopy moments in this but I'll pick one. Harry fights the dementors but is overcome by their numbers, Harry thinks his father comes to fights them off. A few hours later Harry travels back in time to arrive at the same moment when he see himself fighting the dementors in vein. Waits for his father to arrive and help the past Harry than realises it was himself that helped fight them off. An intrinsic loop where effect creates the cause creating the same effect.
B) Time travel object appear to have no origin.
b1) ABC's Lost series. The Compass paradox. Richard gives John a compass in the 2000s. JOhn travels back in time to 1950s. Gives Richard the compass. Richard waits half a century, giving the compass back to john. Compass has no origin of production but is ageing with every loop.
Mod
I'd like to contribute:
4. Time travel is an endless and intrinsic loop where effects create the causes that leads to the effects.
A) effect - cause - effect cycle has no origin.
a1) Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkhaban. There are several delicious loopy moments in this but I'll pick one. Harry fights the dementors but is overcome by their numbers, Harry thinks his father comes to fights them off. A few hours later Harry travels back in time to arrive at the same moment when he see himself fighting the dementors in vein. Waits for his father to arrive and help the past Harry than realises it was himself that helped fight them off.
B) Time travel object appear to have no origin but is ageing with every loop
b1) ABC's Lost series. The Compass paradox. Richard gives John a compass in the 2000s. JOhn travels back in time to 1950s. Gives Richard the compass. Richard waits half a century, giving the compass back to john. Compass has no origin of production but is ageing with every loop.
Clearly this Topic has to abide by the rules of 1B(1). Only the newst and most current reality will be in the first post. I will add the changes to the first post in the topic, so that at any moment people can view the entire outline in its most up-to-date form. But of course all the additions/discussions will be left hanging below for people to look at.
There was a short story which is a good example of 2. It was about a small town where a whole bunch of weird strangers suddenly arrive one summer. We discover they are travelers from the future. At the very end it is revealed that everyone's coming to view the last flowering of the society, which is just about to be wiped out forever by a plague. (I can remember neither title nor author.)
An elaboration on 3A that I once read and liked:Time travelers can change the past, but only big changes affect the long-term future of the existing society. Most changes result in an alternate reality splitting off the existing timeline, but eventually, those alternate realities rejoin the existing timeline and thus have no long-term impact. For example, if I was an only child who had no children and never did anything of societal importance during my life, I could go back and kill my parents, creating an alternate timeline. But, after I died in the alternate timeline, it would then be the same as, and thus rejoin, the existing timeline.
In the book, historians had figured out that there were only a few historical events that were absolutely essential to preserving the existing timeline, so people were free to travel back to any times other than those few critical windows with no concerns about changing the past/future.
You don't remember the name of the work?
It was a Star Trek book I read many years ago. The time travel thing was a relatively minor part of the book. Some planet they visited was nearly deserted because everyone had gone back to live in other times when the climate was better, or something like that.
In an effort to cross-pollinate, I am going to copy over the Taxonomy to my blog at Book View Cafe (www.bookviewcafe.com/blog). Lots of writers there to make additions.
